Chapter Twenty
I ris wasn’t sure how much she believed what she was thinking. Hearing. What she and Scott were getting around to saying. But then, she’d never have believed that sharing her past would free her, either. She’d changed herself to get away from the pain, when, in the end, sharing it had helped.
“You got any ideas?” she asked him. She’d never been all that great at dice throwing. She’d been the practical one. Ivy had been more prone to taking chances, dragging Iris along with her every single time. Usually benefiting them both.
He shrugged. “We continue exactly as we always have, except, when we both are in the mood, we add the sex component.”
She nodded. Liked the words. Wasn’t at all sure how the concept would realistically play out. “Do we tell Sage and Gray?”
“No.” She felt as adamantly about the response as he sounded. And nodded.
“Good,” she said. So far, they seemed to be on the same page. She wanted everything she was hearing. He hadn’t said anything that she didn’t want. Hope started to stir within her.
She tamped it back down. Wasn’t ready for that entity to enter her life again. Doubted she would ever be ready.
Hope had no tangible qualities, and therefore, no guarantees. And definitely came with no warranty. It led one to trust it, and then just…disappeared.
“How do we prevent them from finding out?” she asked. “Practically speaking.”
He shrugged again. Seemingly in the relaxed mood she liked so much. “We use the street to get back and forth,” he said. Then added, “We see each other on the beach, or not, as usual. Everything stays the same. Except, when we want to have sex, one or the other of us leaves again, by the front door, and walks to the other’s front door.”
No one ever used their front doors on a regular basis. They drove into their garages and entered the cottages through the garage door into the house. It was just a thing.
Guests used the front doors. Deliveries. And if anyone was out front, she or Scott could just wait to hook up.
She nodded. Feeling a smile coming on. Until she thought about Scott at work, coming home after work. Or not.
The not part, if he was working late, wasn’t an issue. She had to be able to work as long as she needed as well, without feeling as though someone was waiting on her.
Or like she was letting someone down.
But Scott wasn’t always absent from the beach for work.
“I do have one caveat,” she said, her chest tight. She wanted what he was offering more than she could remember wanting something in a long, long time. But not if it meant losing what they already had. And if he was sleeping with her and then…
“Let’s hear it,” he said, as though, whatever it was, they’d figure out a way to make it work.
“We aren’t committed to each other for anything. No expectations. Except for one.”
Which meant expectation. She saw his eyes dim some, and his tone was a little less…relaxed as he said, “What is it?”
“As long as we’re having sex with each other, the sex has to be monogamous.” She held her breath, waiting to hear that the condition was a deal-breaker, but also knowing herself well enough to believe that it couldn’t happen any other way.
He threw up his hands, and she braced. “Done.”
That was it? Done?
Frowning, she asked, “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. One of my rules. I don’t sleep with more than one woman at a time. I don’t see it as healthy, and it’s way too complicated. You’re out to dinner with one, run into another…” He shook his head. “I don’t need, or want to cause, that kind of grief.”
Wow. She barely stopped herself from saying the word aloud. She’d known him three years. And for all three of those years, she’d figured him for having multiple sexual partners on a regular basis. Not that he ever talked about any of them. Other than an older woman he’d dated for a while the previous fall. Just…he’d always been so casual about dating…she’d thought…
Didn’t matter what she’d thought.
He was smiling. She was smiling.
And he was only a few arm’s lengths away. “You up for a redo?” she asked him, watching his expression for any signs of doubt.
His eyes were already slumbrous with passion as he nodded toward his crotch. “What do you think?”
Iris didn’t think. With her hands running up his shirt, caressing his skin as they moved, she helped get Scott off the couch and into her bedroom.
They had all night.
It just made good sense to get comfortable.
* * *
Scott and Iris made no plans to see each other over the next week. He drove himself to his doctor visit on Tuesday morning without issue. His stitches came out, though the nurse practitioner who saw him butterflied the small area where his sutures had been ripped apart. And on Tuesday afternoon, still on crutches, he went back to work. And worked late.
He’d been following the Polly Ernst murder-for-hire trial as best he could through email, phone calls and even some video snippets, advising his second chair as he was able, and the prosecution was close to resting its case. He had to be in court on Wednesday to question their final witness, the defendant, Polly. And thereafter, to hear the defense’s case, so that he could be ready for final arguments.
And he’d been assigned a new case as well. A county prosecutor was on trial for having a relationship with a juror during a high-profile case. The charges had been filed in Los Angeles County, not in San Diego, but the trial had been moved to his jurisdiction.
Dale was back to letting Morgan out, and feeding her, too, as needed. Except that both nights that he worked late, the dog had run down beach to find Angel, and Iris had taken her from there.
He and Iris didn’t eat together at all that week. But every night, they met up. Three times when Angel had run down the beach to her friend and Iris had followed, to find him sitting on his back porch so Morgan could play in the sand. And Tuesday and Wednesday nights, out front, when he’d hobbled himself down to her place to collect Morgan.
Six nights in a row they’d shared a bed. Not all night. One or the other of them got up before dawn and made their way home. Him crutching it in the dark with Morgan by his side.
Six of the best nights of his life.
Scott knew the sex wasn’t always going to be as compelling. And at the same time, couldn’t wait for his leg and back to heal enough to allow him to give Iris the pleasure he knew he had to give. To make love to her so thoroughly that she’d never forget some of the moments in his arms.
He also looked forward to getting back on the beach with her. They only had two more nights before Sage and Gray came home, and as much as Scott yearned to see Leigh—and hoped his little niece hadn’t grown up too drastically during her month-long trip abroad—he also dreaded the loss of freedom he and Iris had had to enjoy each other without subterfuge.
To just be themselves.
Under Sage’s watchful eye things would have to change. The last thing he and Iris needed was to have his sister aware that they were having sex. She’d be all about having them engaged and married before summer.
The possibility loomed, growing so strong, that on Friday night, as he lay in his guest room with a naked and very relaxed Iris, he couldn’t just drift off to sleep. Based on the way Iris was running a finger along his forearm, he knew she wasn’t done with the night yet, either.
“One more night until Sage is back,” he said, knowing that the only way they were going to continue to work was through complete honesty. With themselves and each other.
“I know.”
“If she has any idea, gets any hint…”
“I know.”
“She reads me…”
“I know.”
He nodded. Relaxing some. He didn’t have to explain Sage to Iris. She really did know. As well and probably better than he did.
“She’ll think she knows more than we do about getting over the hurdles that keep people single.” He said what had been on his mind for days. “Because she was right where we were, for years. And then managed to climb hers.”
“She already told me, a week or so before the wedding, that she’d never expected to marry. That she’d been unable to love that deeply again,” Iris said, her tone soft, but not content. “Trying to get me to be open to the possibility that I, too, might feel differently. When the right guy came along.”
He tensed. He couldn’t help it. He was who he was. If Iris was about to tell him that the past week had changed her, too, that he was the right guy…
“Sage will say whatever she’s going to say. She can believe with all her heart that she’s right, but it isn’t going to change who we are, Scott. That’s all we have to remember…”
His breath came easy again. His body relaxed.
And he felt sad, too.
Which made no sense at all.
* * *
Iris didn’t want to have to hide. To go back to pretending to be someone she was not. Scott was worried that Sage’s opinion, her attempts to interfere with them, to make them more than they were, would somehow come between them.
Iris had a different fear keeping her awake. “We said we’d be honest with each other,” she told him.
“Mmm-hmm.”
Not much encouragement there, but she didn’t stop. “I’m finding that I can’t go back to a life of pretense, Scott.”
She felt him tense up again, as he had when she’d mentioned Sage’s talk with her before the wedding. Tempted to slide her fingers off his arm, to move away, as was her way—to pull inside herself, she made herself stay put. She’d fought too long and too hard to take back her life, to make a life for herself. She couldn’t give up herself.
Most particularly not after finding out how much of her was still in there. Taking a deep breath, she said, “I’ve spent the past three years living only part of my life.”
He didn’t move. Not toward her. But not away, either.
“Talking to you last week, it wasn’t just me sharing my past with a friend, Scott.” She lay on her side, with her fingers still on his arm, looking at the wall beyond him. “As it turned out, it was me accepting the past as part of who I am. About bringing me fully into the present. I feel stronger. Healthier. Happier, even, though I know a lot of that has to do with you. But, regardless, I can’t go back into hiding.”
She raised her glance up to him as she said the last. Afraid. But knowing she was doing the right thing, too.
His jaw was tight. She saw his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed. “What are you saying?” His question held no judgment. But there was definite reticence there. A possibility that he wouldn’t be on board.
“I’m saying I don’t want to hide,” she said. “What we do, the choices we make, who we have sex with, where, what it means…that’s fully up to us, Scott.”
“You’re telling me you want to make some kind of announcement to Sage and Gray?” His tone had gotten thinner.
“No. Of course not.” The truth. Not said because she could very likely be losing him. “But if we’re on the beach, and want to walk to my place or yours, together, we need to do that. Just like we’ve been doing all week. Sort of. Like we’d be doing if you could walk the beach.”
“They’ll figure us out the first night that happens.”
“I know.”
“So how is this different from making an announcement?”
He hadn’t left the bed. But then, they were at his place. In the bed he slept in.
“Making an announcement makes it more than it is. Like we’ve both changed, made a commitment to be a couple. We aren’t that. So to do that would mislead her. We just need to be who we are. Show her, don’t tell her. Be who we’ve always been, other than, you know, the naked part.” She wanted to touch his stomach then. Maybe move her hand lower. Figured the timing wasn’t right. Settled for talking more. “At some point, she clues in to what we’re doing, comes to us. We act casual, because this part of our relationship is just that. We tell her that it’s not a big deal. She believes us or she doesn’t. We have no control over that, nor does what Sage thinks to herself have any effect on whether or not we have casual sex. As long as we’re honest with each other, and both keep wanting what we have, we continue as we are.”
Iris rolled onto her back as she finished. She’d said everything she had to say. Would stand by it. Feeling good about it.
And she’d deal with what Scott chose to do. Either way.
Figuring she’d give him a minute or two, and then get up and head home, she stared at his ceiling. Looking at shadows cast by the hall light. Joined by the moonlight.
Illumination that met in the dark by chance. Both sources of which would work just fine, be unaffected if they didn’t meet.
“I think you’re right.”
About the moon not being changed without Scott’s hall light on? Her first thought covered the shakiness inside her. For a second or two. “You do?”
Turning slowly, Scott propped himself up and reached over to stroke the hair back from her forehead. A touch that seemed to mesmerize her. “I do,” he said. “In the first place, of course Sage is going to sense the difference in me, and in us. But more than that, no more hiding for you. And third, no more feeling like we aren’t good enough just as we are.”
Iris blinked at the tears that sprang to her eyes as Scott’s lips came down to hers. And she gave herself wholly up to him as the kiss grew into more, too.
She might have been robbed of the ability to believe in happily-ever-after as Sage did. But she believed in the moment.
And was grateful for every one of them that she could share with this man.
Scott Martin was not her twin.
But, inside, he was a lot like her. He got her.
And she got him, too.
Which was as close to truly happy as she was ever going to get.